One of the dates of faith in the history of Christiania is April 1st, 1976. After some years of vacillating in the so called Christiania question, in the spring of 1975 the Danish Parliament had finally set the deadline for the clearance of the Free Town. Some three months before the planned clearing, however, a documentary entitled Dagbog fra en fristad (Denmark, 1971; English translation Diary from a Free Town) was broadcast on national television. This documentary by Danish filmmaker Poul Martinsen followed the ‘typical’ Danish family Hansen from Hedehusene, a suburban city between Copenhagen and Roskilde, on their visit to Christiania. Featuring Eli Hansen, an unemployed construction worker in his forties; Lise Hansen, a cleaning assistant in her late thirties; and their two sons, Morten, eleven and Jesper, sixteen years old, as they agreed to spend a week in the Free Town, the documentary provided a combined insider/outsider perspective of the contested area. While the family initially held the view that the community should be closed, by the end of the week Mr and Mrs Hansen and their two sons had changed opinion. Having shared the daily life of the Christianites, the family was much closer to the view that Christiania presented an alternative that should remain. Transmitting a shift in attitude, the televised stay of the Family Hansen eventually made the liberal government understand that a clearance was politically impossible, and only two days before the planned closure, the government launched the idea of a ‘soft landing’, changing the demand for immediate closure to a closure ‘without unnecessary delay.’
When the Danish broadcasting company through Poul Martinsen twelve years later staged a revisit, Gensyn med Christiania (Danmark, 1988; English translation Return to Christiania), the Hansen Family was confronted with an equally contested, yet perhaps even more precarious situation. While everyday life in the mid seventies was a self evident public and political concern, it had by the late eighties become harder to locate and picture. Taking the point of departure in Martinsen’s project about the Hansens’ sojourns in the Free Town, this chapter will address the composite relationship between social experimentation, documentary practice and the ambiguous and yet politically charged notion of ‘everyday life’.